Too visionary for 1960s Chile

Published 4:00 am, Thursday, March 10, 2005

Infused with idealism, two Stanford University graduates and future titans of Bay Area beverages -- Paul Draper and Fritz Maytag -- headed for Chile in 1965 to both do good and seek their fortune.

"These were the Kennedy years," Draper says. "Kennedy said, 'What can you do?' and we all wanted to do something."

With a third partner, Sam Armstrong, they formed a foundation called Pacific Development International to tackle agricultural problems, such as the country's lack of protein-rich foods to feed its population. Initially they worked with soybeans, with which Maytag -- who grew up in Iowa -- was very familiar.

But Draper and Maytag -- who now owns San Francisco-based Anchor Brewing Co. and Anchor Distilling, as well as York Creek Vineyards -- were both wine drinkers, and they began wondering if the humble local wine ("The Chilean Cabernet was pretty good, but it was never thrilling," Maytag says) could be upgraded into something worth exporting.

"They had more old-vine Cabernet than in California," Draper says. "Fritz and I thought if we make a wine good enough to export out of these great grapes, it will earn foreign exchange. We spoke to the export board and they were all very polite, but they did nothing. We decided that we'd have to do it ourselves. At that point, a light went off. I'd always thought you'd have to have this degree in enology to make wine. Why not make wine the way it's always been made?"

The "young whippersnappers" from California leased a small vineyard from a family that had been selling grapes to a co-op. To learn the ropes, Draper visited a friend with a chateau in Bordeaux and worked a harvest in Napa Valley on Howell Mountain with pioneering winemaker Lee Stewart.

Draper returned to Chile in 1967 to make his first vintage. He quickly discovered that getting good grapes was not going to be his problem -- everything else was.

First, the impoverished country had no new oak barrels and little foreign currency to splurge on them.

"There were some barrels 50 and 60 years old still being used," Draper says. "We ended up going to furniture and flooring manufacturers. They had cut down some individual ornamental oak trees and we wanted to make barrels from them."

Then Draper discovered that while the country did have coopers, they were used to working with a local tree, rauli, that was much softer than oak.

"I had to learn exactly how to make barrels to tell them how to do it," Draper says.

Maytag recalls, "Paul made native Chilean wood barrels. It was my job to keep them from leaking."

Bottles were another problem.

"Paul was sitting in the office of the bottling company trying to find a bottle that would pass muster in the U.S. market," Maytag says. "Bottles were crooked, bottles were only halfway green, capsules were plastic, corks were short and deformed. None of these things are proof that the wine won't be good, but U.S. customers would shy away. Paul is looking at these bottles and he assumes that they're all from different molds. He finds one that he likes and asks the bottling man if he can order more like it. Turns out all the bottles are from the same mold."

Still they persevered, making wine for three years. Then an impending political change -- an election in which socialist Salvador Allende, the eventual winner, was favored -- made them fear nationalization of their fledgling industry. They decided to close down their foundation and return home to seek their fortune in California.

"All the things we looked into in Chile are now happening -- exporting seafood, though Chilean sea bass is now becoming extinct. Exporting off-season fruit," Draper says.

And, of course, exporting wine. Draper was so far ahead of his time in Chile that the country didn't begin to grasp his idea for more than a decade. Chile's loss was California's gain.

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